Carl

You should read the article. Linus simply said that LLMs have been useful for finding more bugs, which has led to larger patches (because each patch contains more fixes). They aren’t vibe coding the kernel.

Yeah, even the smartest cats are only about as smart is a 3 year old. And anyone who has ever watched a 3 year old knows that they’re constantly attempting to kill themselves. The issue is that cats have the physical capacity to get into way more dangerous scenarios, because they can easily jump, climb, and squeeze into places that a 3 year old wouldn’t be able to. So even if you have toddler-proofed your house, (which is a massive task by itself) there are still plenty of things that a cat can get into.

Hey now, it isn’t only Nazis…
^{It’s also an overwhelming amount of CSAM…}

“Jay” was a term for a country person who moved to the city. Like “hick” or “yokel”. They called it jaywalking because jays would visit the city and wander across the street without checking for traffic first. Because they weren’t used to the road being busy out in the country. So it became a fairly common thing for traffic to get held up because some yokel casually wandered across the street while looking at billboards and shop signs, instead of looking at the traffic. Thus, jaywalking.

It can also mean that a mod removed the post. There was a dust-up in one of the self hosting communities a while back, when people were complaining about users deleting their “I’m having a weird issue with this setup, any tips” types of posts after getting answers. People were even talking about rules to ban repeat offenders.

Turns out, a mod was deleting the posts and citing a “must be about self hosting” rule to say that they should be posted in a tech support community instead. But since the mod wasn’t active 24/7, the posts were often deleted after they had already been answered.

The reason I remember it is because the whole thing ended with that mod throwing a tantrum, promoting some random users to mods with an “if it’s so easy to moderate, you fuckin do it then” message, and deleting their account.

Literally this:

Because the blockchain is a ledger that is available to anyone who wants to view it.

No, the cold wallets were using a predictable algorithm to generate key phrases. When you set up the wallet, you use the generated key phrase to pair it with your coins. So this wallet is supposed to live offline, keeping your coins safe because the key is kept offline. No way to hack it if it’s entirely offline. But a flaw caused the generated keys to be predictable, meaning hackers were able to brute force the keys and initiate coin transfers without even messing with the cold wallet.

Imagine you lock a million dollars behind a super secure vault door. This vault is impervious to all kinds of physical and digital attacks. The only way to open it is with the key. The vault is in a public area, but (again) there is no way to open it without the key. This vault only has one key, which you keep safely stored in a separate secure facility. Additionally, this key has like a thousand pins and tumblers, so it should be nearly impossible for a hacker to guess the correct key. The hackers essentially realized that due to a flaw in the lock’s design, there were only like three dozen potential key combinations. The thousand pins didn’t actually matter, because they were predictably arranged at the factory that built the lock. So the thieves just made like two dozen fake keys (until they got the correct one,) then took the money. All without touching (or even seeing) your key.

The real move would be to include polarized lenses or a holographic coating to block infrared facial ID cameras like Flock. Because most sunglasses don’t block the infrared spectrum, meaning something like a Flock camera can see right through them.

These are basically just a dad joke, based on the fact that meta has made every other pair of sunglasses “anti-pervert sunglasses” by default.

My housemate didn’t believe that his TV whistled. It was so loud I could hear it inside my car as I was pulling into the driveway.

Shot in the dark here, but consider L-methylfolate supplements. It’s the methylated form of folic acid (vitamin B9). Your symptoms line up extremely well with someone who is suffering from non-methylated folic acid, due to a mutation on the MTHFR gene.

Your body can’t use folic acid as-is. It needs to methylate it with an enzyme in your bloodstream (turning it into L-methylfolate) before it becomes biologically available.

Your body uses this biologically available L-methylfolate to break down something called homocysteine, which is a byproduct of producing DNA during cell replication. So the symptoms are caused by a 1-2 punch of your body working harder to replicate cells (because it doesn’t have the folic acid available to break down homocysteine when it is produced) and having too much homocysteine built up in your system (because it isn’t being broken down over time with folic acid.) High homocysteine levels contribute to all kinds of potential health effects, ranging everywhere from cardiopulmonary issues to brain fog.

And there is a gene mutation that causes you to stop producing that MTHFR enzyme, the same way you become lactose intolerant when you stop producing the enzyme to break down lactose. It usually happens in your late 20’s or early 30’s, so you’re right in expected timeframe for it to happen.

It’s not on most doctors’ radars, and testing folic acid levels on a blood test won’t help, because you probably have plenty of folic acid. Your cells simply can’t access it. So it tends to fly under the radar. Properly diagnosing it requires a gene test, which most healthcare providers won’t even think about unless you request it. Or I guess you could always just try the supplement and see if your symptoms improve.

The gene mutation is especially common in people who are AFAB, autistic, or Irish. I know because my wife is all three, and has the mutation. You can buy supplements on Amazon. Most people with the mutation take about 15mg of L-methylfolate per day, but suggest starting with about half that in the morning. It will likely keep you awake (and maybe give you a headache, oddly enough) at first, so start with just taking it in the morning. Then once you’re used to it, you can take a second one with dinner. Then you can simply move up to taking the full 15mg in the morning.

Obviously don’t start taking supplements without looking into it first. But at least this might give you another thread to tug on.

The issue is doing one at scale, with proper access controls. Also, let’s not skip past the whole “network isn’t air gapped anymore” side of things. Now you’re having to maintain firewalls, patch firmwares, manage users, enforce good password hygiene, etc… All without any additional IT support or hardware, because management is doing this as a cost cutting measure.

I can pretty much guarantee that the systems that get hacked aren’t the ones that do everything right. They’re the ones who have a single shared VPN password, haven’t updated their firewall since it was installed 8 years ago, and they haven’t even changed the default passwords for their control systems. Because they got tired of answering phone calls about what the password was, so they just made every username and password something stupid like admin/admin.

Literally this. It starts with “everything needs to be on an air gapped LAN so we can control it.” And then suddenly that air gapped LAN isn’t air gapped, because someone got tired of paying the call-out fee every time the on-call person had to drive to the site to push a few buttons on a keyboard. But figuring out a proper VPN (or at least a reverse proxy with access control) was too difficult or expensive, (management thinks the point is to save money on call out fees, not spend money on proper hardware) so they just poked a bunch of port-forwarded holes in the firewall and called it a day.

Most of my reading is done via audiobooks these days, simply because I can listen while doing other tasks. I can wash the dishes, vacuum the house, etc, and those things would normally prevent me from reading. But with audiobooks, that isn’t a concern. Once I started listening to audiobooks, my annual book count went from ~12 to +60. Simply because I don’t have enough time to dedicate just to sitting in one spot staring at pages.

For visual reading, I tend to use my kobo. I got particularly lazy about bed-reading though. I got a gooseneck mount. It attaches to my headboard, and holds my kobo wherever I want. Combine that with a Bluetooth page-turn remote, and I can comfortably lay in bed and read without even needing to keep my hands on the ereader. In terms of comfort, the mount and remote are the two single greatest investments I ever made, and they fundamentally changed the way I think about reading in bed.

And the genocide of the Native Americans. Hitler used that as the inspiration for the holocaust.

Interesting take with Dread, because it’s one of my favorites. The only section I legitimately dislike is

That one specific boss can get fucked.

The Sims will be a great case study for some future game design student, in how to take a massively popular IP and ride it straight into the fucking ground. It’s like EA intentionally makes the wrong choice at every single turn. You’d think that eventually they would stumble across the right thing to do, but somehow they seem determined to keep making bad decisions.

My complaints with the game weren’t based on the difficulty. Elden Ring was just a lifeless world that used “open world exploration” to pad the playtime. In contrast, I loved Sekiro because it was a tight concise game with solid progression and a sense of exploration without needing to cross vast swaths of nothing in between each area.

Plus I tend to dislike games that use animation locks as an artificial form of difficulty. In Sekiro, you’re consistently the fastest character in the game. The game feels responsive. If you fail to parry an attack, it’s because you as the player failed. But with most FromSoft games, they use slow animations as a way of artificially introducing difficulty.

Yeah, I always ended up doing custom bases for each resource, and then tying it all together with trains. It kept things fresh, because main bus designs absolutely suck the fun out of it. A properly organized and optimized train network is truly a marvel to behold. I always avoided going full grid with my trains, simply because I wanted to avoid the exact “micro factory inside of each square” problem you touched on.

I used a grid for my trains, but only to make blueprinting easier. Nothing worse than bringing two tracks from different parts of your base together, only to realize they can’t actually mate because the damned tracks are off by one square (one started on an odd square, another started on an even) and the tracks literally won’t let you bend them into place to meet in the middle. The grid was simply a standardized track length, so I knew my intersections would always meet up cleanly. Basically, I wanted to avoid this problem:

But I also haven’t touched Space Age at all, so maybe trains are an old meta by now.

In a statement, Murphy cited the recovery amount, personal payments by former executives, a commitment for $7 million to go to nonprofits and the absence of a confidentiality provision in a system where “wrongdoers too often hide their misdeeds by dangling compensation in front of those they victimized and trading that compensation for confidentiality or an NDA.”

Glad they stuck to their guns. I’ve been following this case for a few years now. This all began as an attempt by eBay’s C-level executives to bully a few reporters into silence. It makes perfect sense that those reporters would refuse to accept an NDA as part of the settlement, because reporting on things like this is exactly what landed them on eBay’s radar in the first place.